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I know that title seems like a bit of a joke, or maybe something you’re thinking “there’s simply no way those can taste good.” One day when I brought a batch of these to work, a co-worker sarcastically asked me “are they cookies made of cinnamon and air?” No, I know it seems strange, but I swear by these cookies. They’re healthy and have a great balance of sweet and salty. They’re served chilled and are perfect for hot summer days when you’re craving something sweet but don’t want something too heavy.

Ingredients:

2 cups almond meal/flour

2 tablespoons butter, melted and cooled

2 tablespoons honey

1 tablespoon shredded coconut flakes (skip if you don’t like the coconut flavor)

In a medium bowl, mix the dry ingredients (almond flour, coconut flakes, cinnamon, salt and lemon zest). Add the lemon juice, honey and butter, and mix in thoroughly, using your hands at the end to make sure it’s all incorporated together. Using your hands, shape about a tablespoons-worth of dough into a ball (or any shape you want!) and put onto a piece of wax or parchment paper on a plate. (Don’t worry if you don’t have special paper, just put them directly on a plate and be careful when you remove them.) Stick the plate in the freezer for about an hour to set. Store them in an airtight container in the freezer if you want them on the hard side and in the fridge if you’d like them softer. These area great on a hot day, and the lack of sugar and traditional flour makes them easy on your stomach. I love grabbing two of these for breakfast on busy mornings – they’re sweet but healthy and quite filling.

Ah chocolate. What could be better? As an avid baker I recently started experimenting with one of my favorite chocolatey desserts: classic chocolate cake. I got into my research mode, started looking at recipes, weighing the pros and cons of buttermilk versus sour cream, and I found myself asking one big question: Dutched cocoa and natural cocoa, what’s the difference? Continue reading →

What’s better on a cold winter’s day than a hot bowl of soup for dinner? Not a whole lot, except maybe a bowl of hot dal. There are many variations of this creamy lentil dish throughout India, with each region having their own recipes and methods. The recipe below is somewhat of a mish-mash of a few recipes, accounting for what I had on hand. This dish is great with basmati rice or a hearty naan, roti or other bread.

This recipe makes enough for 4 or 2 with some leftovers.

Ingredients

2 cups yellow or green lentils (or a combination of both). Soak these overnight. If you don’t have time, soak for an hour or two while you prepare the other ingredients.

Heat the olive oil in a large soup pot on medium heat. Add the onions, garlic, ginger and some salt. Stir for a few minutes, until the onion becomes translucent. Add all the spices and stir occasionally for the next 5 minutes to bring out their flavor. Drain the lentils from their water and add them and the carrots and the rest of the salt to the pot. Add the water. Bring the mixture to a boil and then reduce to a simmer. Let the dal simmer for the next hour and ten minute to hour and a half. If the water is gone after an hour and ten minutes and you have a nice, thick consistency, try a spoonful and decide if the carrots and lentils are soft enough to be eaten. If they’re not, add another half cup of water and let simmer for another 20 minutes.

Although it’s in no way traditional, I love putting a sliced avocado on top of my dal. I also use making dal as an excuse to buy some Indian beer – Kingfisher is my favorite.

Leftovers can be stored in an airtight container in the fridge for about a week.

Most of us have been faced with the dilemma of dealing with a few rapidly ripening bananas and understand the tension between not wanting to waste good food while also not wanting to put overly soft, brown bananas on top of our morning cereal. After my partner and I both purchased a full bunch of bananas on the same day, I found myself staring down at half a dozen soft, spotted pieces of the yellow fruit and debating what I would bake to use them up. Bananas are wonderfully versatile in baking, as their soft consistency doesn’t create the worry of getting the fruit soft enough to be enjoyable (like apples), but aren’t so juicy that one must compensate for the extra liquid by adding other ingredients (like with blueberries). I quickly found a recipe for banana cookies in my recipe tin, copied down during the year of so I spent building out this tin’s collection as a college student. Since I had just purchased some hazelnut paste (basically unsweetened Nutella), I decided to incorporate it into the recipe. I added the claim of “healthy” to this recipe after modifying the original to include less sugar and more banana, as well as more oats. I find that with a little experimentation, one can always decrease the amount of sugar and increase the amount of redeeming ingredients, and luckily, I got it right on my first try with these cookies.

I am a huge fan of simple, delicious meals that are easy to make a ton of and make great left overs, aiding in that endless quest for more time during the business of life. Of the various meals I make with the intent of eating a few times throughout the week and freezing a portion of for later, Thai curry is one that stands out from the crowd due to the fact that it gets even better with time. It’s great the day you make it and even better a few days later, when the spices have had time to seep into the coconut milk and become more rich and complex.

Thai curry is also a favorite because of its versatility – almost any vegetable that’s in season and available at the farmer’s market will fit in nicely, and you can even rely on it in winter when we’ve got little more that potatoes and carrots lining the tables of the winter markets. You barely need a plan when going into it, and the only thing you really need to worry about is buying the right amount of cans of coconut milk for how much you want to make. And, of course, that you have some Thai Red Curry Powder on hand. This is a great seasoning with medium heat, and it’s the only thing I use in my curry recipe other than a generous helping of salt at the end (for things like this I like some good old standard Kosher salt).

We love to talk with our customers in the store, we enjoy hearing what they plan on making with the spices and seasonings they are buying. Often we go home wanting to cook what we chatted about most during the day. Internet orders also have the ability to intrigue us. When we sent our second large order this year to Camp Denali, in Denali National Park in Alaska, we just had to look it up. What were our spices doing here? Why would a camp need the highest quality spices? They sent us this wonderful write-up. And bonus, they included a recipe, how amazing! This curry soup would be perfect for our now chilly Midwestern weather. We love the relationships we have with our customers; they are one of the most rewarding experiences of being small business owners. We hope to one day deliver a package there in person. Thank you to author Teresa Floberg and Kristen Vawter for the following lovely post. Lots of fun recipes in their site also. Continue reading →

Though the days remain muggy and blistering, the nights are cooling off and the sun is setting earlier – we are in the twilight of summer. Soon the city will be a crisp swirl of colored leaves and we’ll be making up for the lack of warmth with fires and hot drinks – but until then, I’ll be making this salad multiple times a week, a salad I call the last salad of summer.

I’ve written before about my obsession with local, in-season tomatoes, and you can bet that I’ll be buying them from the farmer’s markets up until the very end of their all-too-short season. This salad recipe is simple – when you have flavors this good, there’s not much need for anything flashy.

This salad is raw, vegetarian, and vegan if you don’t include the cheese. Give it some variety by throwing in other vegetables you have on hand – half of a shredded carrot, small cubes of summer squash varieties, and bit of cubed onion, for example, would all be great additions.

Tomatoes have finally arrived at the markets, marking a period of time that I’ll spend plotting my week around visiting Chicago’s markets and co-ops on various days of the week, knowing that each tomato purchase is only going to last me a day or two. Tomatoes – especially those mixtures of summer sungolds, purple zebras, and baby romas – may just be my all-time favorite local food.

I went my whole childhood adamantly hating tomatoes, picking them off of sandwiches and ignoring them in salads, only to realize, my sophomore year of college, how much I had been missing out. The problem was that I had been eating pale, flavorless, ghosts of real tomatoes my whole life. I was an active Slow Food UW member during my time in at UW-Madison, and was there that, finally, not willing to be called out my cool local food-obsessed friends, I had my first in-season, locally-grown tomato. It was like a warm little piece of sunshine that exploded its flavor in my mouth – it was the ghost of tomatoes past reincarnated into a living, breathing, incredibly flavorful, naturally sweet little piece of happiness.

Ever since then, I’ve been obsessed with tomatoes, and look forward to them arriving at the markets and dread their inevitable disappearance. While they’re here, I find ways to work them into almost everything I make. In my opinion, tomatoes are among a small number of foods that easily illustrate the difference between local and non-local food. Potatoes or broccoli seem roughly the same regardless of how far away they came from or when they were grown, but tomatoes are different.

Guacamole, of course, begs to have tomatoes included, but this brief period of the summer is the only time I actually include them. Few things are better on a hot Chicago summer day than some fresh chips and guacamole with a refreshing beer – except, of course, that same guacamole with some locally-grown tomatoes thrown in.

Summertime Guacamole with Local Tomatoes

Ingredients:

3 avocados

1/2 of a purple onion, diced into small pieces

10 small tomatoes of any variety (such as sungolds, purple zebras or baby romas), halved or quartered depending on size

Slice open the avocados and remove the pits (an easy way to do this is to use a heavy knife to strike the middle of the pit, hard, so that the knife gets stuck in it, then pull the knife away pit and all. Scoop the flesh out and put it into a large bowl, then mash with a fork. Mix in the salt, cumin and lime juice. If you’re going to add sour cream or yogurt (which give the guacamole a wonderful creaminess), stir it in at this point. Finally, gently stir in the onions, tomatoes and cilantro. Taste by trying on a chip. Enjoy on a patio or deck with a refreshing summer beer.

I’m also not going to go on and on about how bacon makes everything better, even though there’s math to prove it. (Okay, so the results are a little overstated.)

I will even ignore the idea of bacon as the gateway meat for ex-vegetarians, even though there’s a possible evolutionary reason.

The simple fact of the matter is that bacon is delicious and at the end of the day, that’s all that really matters. Just ask these guys.

The toughest part of curing bacon at home is finding pink curing salt #1. Pink curing salt #1, formerly known as Prague Powder #1, is table salt mixed with a bit of sodium nitrite to help inhibit bacterial growth. Coincidentally, the Spice House carries pink curing salt #1. This should not be confused with pink curing salt #2, which also has the addition of sodium nitrate and is used for long cures. (Think dried sausages like Spanish chorizo.) Pink curing salt #1 is for shorter curing times for foods meant to be eaten relatively quickly. Both are colored pink to avoid confusion with table salt, and should not be confused with pink Himalayan salt.

The recipe below is for what’s known as green bacon. After roasting, it is ready to eat. Just cook it normally. It can also be hung to dry or smoked after roasting, both of which will help preserve it longer. Or, cut it into one pound pieces, wrap well in plastic, put it into a freezer storage bag and freeze.

Mix dry ingredients well. Rub thoroughly into pork belly. Put the pork into a resealable two gallon plastic bag along with any leftover rub. Lay flat the refrigerator and turn over daily. Liquid will begin to accumulate in the bag as it gets drawn out of the meat. When the meat feels firm remove from the refrigerator. (7 days for thinner pieces, 10 days for thicker.) Rinse and pat dry.

Roast at 200° until the internal temperature reaches 150°, about 90 minutes.

Let cool and wrap in plastic. It will keep in the refrigerator for about a week, or in the freezer for about two months.

We’ve recently added a powdered version of everybody’s rooster hot sauce, Sriracha. (Well, “everyone,” except for that neighborhood in California.) After many, many requests we also put an Ethiopian blend, Berbere into the lineup. But, the newcomer I’m most excited about is hibiscus. I’ve mentioned before that I had a career in beverage once upon a time. Given the way my mind still works, I know more intuitively how to work with hibiscus than I do with the Sriracha or Berbere. (Let’s be honest, I’m being lazy, the hibiscus was just way easier for me to work with.)

Hibiscus tea, common in West Africa, the Caribbean and Central America, is most commonly seen here in Chicago in Mexican restaurants as agua de Jamaica. (pronounced: hah-MY-kah) Steeping hibiscus in hot water imparts a brilliant red color shockingly fast and has a surprisingly tart flavor.

I recently wrote about grenadine and that got me thinking about using hibiscus in a similar manner. Where the grenadine has some darker flavors, a hibiscus syrup is going to be at the other end of the spectrum with flavors that are wonderfully bright. Substituting hibiscus syrup for grenadine isn’t a huge leap. While the profiles are different, the flavors hit a lot of the same notes. A cocktail made with hibiscus instead of grenadine will be different, but far from unpleasant. (It’s got the added bonus of being more kid-friendly. I’d use this in a Shirley Temple over the grenadine.)

Tie hibiscus in a double layer of cheesecloth. Add sugar, water, hibiscus and salt to a medium sauce pan over high heat. Stir to dissolve sugar. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer for 15 minutes. Discard hibiscus. Stir in citric acid.